I had a look on ebay seems they are worth £30 for a cheap branded one and upto about £80 for the good Sony video recorders. How come they are worth so much? I take it there's a bit of a retro market for them now? Is it worth holding on to them for a few more years will they increase more in value?

Small markets cost more to produce. I don't suppose there's much call for a recording device that's so low image quality and uses perishable media. I probably paid about £300 for a Sharp nicam model with 4 heads and stereo output 20 years ago.

They're becoming harder to get hold of and people still want them so the price is bound to hold a bit.

I can think of two reasons why people still want them: The first is they have loads of programmes recorded an the second is that many people (especially the elderly) thinking the new technology is harder to operate - the second reason is exacerbated by many people thinking the next step from a VCR is a DVDR (complicated) when for most it should be a PVR (simple).

Perishable media?Still have many tapes that are 25-30 years old no problems with them so far,wonder if you could still watch today's DVDRs in 20 years time.Unless you encode today's media at a decent rate the picture quality is often worse than old VHS even in Long Play.

no thats not really it, its due to LP VHS mode just runs the tape at half speed, and this makes the picture go soft. More video heads also helped to improve this. On DVDR/RW media, the only way to force more onto a disc is to use digital compression, which makes things look like lego blocks. You get the same effect with digital pictures if you zoom in really close on your PC screen, especially if your camera is only 5 or 6MP.

The human eye wont easily spot a soft picture, but will pick up on squares, on say peoples heads.

I point the earlier post above, the step on from VHS is a PVR, where you can record loads and loads to a hard disc drive with no added compression. DVD is still good for pre-recorded playback, but recordable dvd is only really any good for the odd few things you want to record and keep on the shelf for a long time.

^ THIS!!!

I just mean that the number of scan lines on VHS was very low. Even if it encoded the colours in a reliable way it would be like a low quality image. Some pre-recorded music videos I still have are really bad for blues merging with reds.
I transferred a friend's old wedding video to DVD a few years back. I gave him 3 copies and all were encoded at the highest bit rate possible.
I'm perhaps hard on VHS because when TiVo launched the first time in the UK I swapped to recording regular TV digitally. My only tapes were pre-recorded stuff that I've since given away, unable to even sell on ebay.

Heavy, bulky, pain to sell, obsolete, limited supply...the things will then increase in price for those who are still willing to pay, because if you actually need it, you can be charged a fair amount...otherwise they are worthless to you. And if the seller wasn't sufficiently motivated with financial incentive, they couldn't bother with such old equipment either.

If you want to see expensive, look for hi-8 decks.

VHS LP was shit - end of story.
I still have a couple of VCR's and I've used these to copy VHS tapes of material thats not available on dvd over to hard drive then to my own dvd's.

All my camcorder tapes needed copying too.

Like Laserdisc before it there will always be a collectors market to play back items that cannot be obtained on current formats.

Both my Panasonic VCR's are useful as they play SVHS tapes , albeit in VHS quality and they play NTSC tapes too

nudge, nudge!

I still use video recorders of different formats including the early vc1600 format that had the tape spools on top of each other as opposed to side by side, I find little difference in picture quality compared to dvd and the tapes do last longer than dvd. I have found that the later multi-head vhs machines give better picture quality than the mass produced dvd players though a good quality dvd player costing over 400-500 pounds might give slightly better quality pictures. As for having any value, I could sell any of my very old Sony betamax machines and buy 5 dvd players/recorders with the money, check out the prices the good ones are getting on ebay.

I don't follow.

I had several NTSC tapes of films and documentaries that were not out in the UK .
That was at the time of course which is a while back.
There were some documentaries on the Bond films that were made for Laserdisc and I got them on tape aswell as some Twilight Zone episodes that were never repeated on tv.

Although twice in the last 6 months I've had to import NTSC tapes from Amazon for a mate who wanted the films and they were not out on dvd in the US or UK.

Fortunately my Pioneer dvd recorder will accept the PAL 60 output by the VCR - something that Panasonic dvd recorders won't do.

I have a Philips VR-1000 (JVC HR-S7600) which only has brilliant and sound and picture, it has a built-in timebase corrector - excellent for transferring VHS to computer/DVD

I'm currently working my way through hundreds of tapes

Not to mention some people might have loads of VHS tapes of various movies, TV shoes etc. that are hard to find on DVD. I still have a load of VHS tapes I haven't watched in years but our VCR is just gathering dust now. I suppose it has its uses though.

If tape was so good, why didnt D-VHS win out over DVD/R/RW and PVRs?

True as I only use SP or LSP for recordable DVDs.
Which give me 2 hours 30 mins.

On a tape you could get 4 hours in SP or up to 8 hours on LP.
LP on DVD is unwatchable.

It did absolutely nothing - too expensive, too complicated.

The whole point of DVD was the 'V', Versatile - a common format across TV and computers, for data, video and audio was always going to be a winner.

D-VHS was great from a quality point of view and was miles better quality than dvd .
But it came at a time when tape based formats were on the way out and as it was tape it was still prone to the problems inherent with any tape format.

It was better than dvd but it still needed rewinding and did not offer instant access to any section

Nobody said tape was so good anyway.
In general VHS was shit but it was the best we had for a long time

I had over 200 vhs cassettes of recorded content, leaving aside you could never find the right tape, the whole lot will fit on a single tiny usb hdd with instant access even in SD in DVD quality. Using modern hdd you could fit the lot in High Definition on a HDD. Welcome to the 21st century.

Wasn't it too late as well? D-VHS, ISTR reading, was launched in 2004, by which time DVD was obviously well on its way to replacing VHS.

I'm sure I remember reading about D-VHS in an Amiga magazine- IIRC before it was released- in the mid-1990s (long time ago now, but bear in mind that DVD itself came out circa 97-98 which is also a long time).

(According to Wikipedia D-VHS actually came out in 1998).

Yea Dvhs was a funny oddity, the digital theater version that is, because it recorded full hd on svhs tapes long before it was practical any other way.

It's all a bit of a shame.

I've been chucking out high grade VHS tapes left right and centre.

Quality magnetic tape, down the trashcan.

Don't despair....Take up a new hobby...

Uses for old VHS tapes
Crafting with VHS tape

I find they have their uses

I upload old adverts and things up to YouTube and my sources for material are VHS and Betamax tapes